1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a processor controlled water pump.
2. Description of the Related Art
In some parts of the country, hot water is often continuously circulated within the closed water system of a house or business. This is done to reduce the wasting of flowing water while waiting for the hot water to reach a tap in a bathroom or kitchen of a house or office center; the idea is if the water is kept hot at all times, a user will get hot water instantaneously when the user has a demand for hot water. Presumably, the circulating of hot water continuously makes it available at various tap points in a system as needed, thus eliminating the need to run the water at the tap point until it reaches a desired temperature before it can be used.
One example, is a user wanting to take a shower on a cold morning; without the continuously circulating hot water, the user will turn on the shower, and as the piping system will generally have cooled down to no higher than room temperature by the morning, all of the water in the pipes must be exhausted through the tap, before the hot water stored in the hot water tank reaches the shower head. The user must wait until the water reaches a “comfortable” temperature while the shower is running. This wastes valuable water because the user waits for the water to reach a comfortable temperature while the tap is running before he/she can start to use the water. The continuous pumping of the hot water to circulate it throughout a water system thus eliminates the inherent waste of water in non-circulating systems. However, relatively large amounts of energy are needed to circulate the water continuously and thus this approach is wasteful, because heat loss occurs in the piping and most practical real world systems have large periods of time where no one is using the hot water and yet it is still being circulated and maintained at a relatively high temperature.
In some areas, instead of continuously circulating the water in the system, a pump can be made to operate in a continuous pulse mode, i.e., on for a period and off for a period, on a continuing basis. For example, a pulse mode can comprise 75 seconds on and 15 minutes off, all day, every day.